Southern Fried Science Has A NEW Header Image

At least for a month.

Roughly every month your beloved Southern Fried Science rotates the main header image for its site. The idea behind this format, is that it freshens up the site’s homepage, but also gives our readers the opportunity to have their pictures featured on the site.

This month’s header image was provided by me, and was captured with Wormcam. The image displays a mud crab in it’s burrow near the mouth of the York River, a tributary of Chesapeake Bay, under the Coleman Bridge (a bit of specifics for those familiar with the area).

I love this image for so many reasons. 1) The image is just plain cool. Aesthetically it is one of the better images we have captured with Wormcam. But I also love this image because 2) it represents scientific progress. Studying the subsurface of soft-sediments is notoriously difficult given the opaqueness of sediment. Studying subsurface sediment processes, continually, over long periods of time is even more difficult given the corrosive nature of sediment redox reactions. Wormcam provides us the ability for long-term observation of subsurface sediment processes, and in the process captures never before seen behaviors, interactions, and dynamism of the structural complexity cryptically hidden below the sediment surface of marine systems.

This image captures a mud crab in it’s burrow, but is apart of a larger series of images that displays the behavior and actions of this buried crab in response to erosion and accretion events, co-occupancy of the burrow by other organisms, predatory digging around the mouth of the burrow, and even the intrusion of a clam siphon from below into the burrow.